Slavery in Black & White

Erskine Clarke’s Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic is a study
of a small group of families, both black and white, in one Georgia county,
in the decades before the Civil War. At that time and in that place, the black
families were enslaved to the white families, living under the peculiar institution
that represents the original sin in the national narrative of America as Eden.
The book recently won the Bancroft Prize, one of history’s highest honors.

Clarke tells the story of Presbyterian minister and slaveholder Charles Colcock
Jones and his family. Jones was a major figure in the Evangelical “Mission
to Slaves” in the South, a movement among southern Evangelicals to bring
the gospel to the slave population. The book follows Jones’s lifelong
efforts to apply Christian principles to the peculiar institution (and his
own plantation) by preaching the mutual duties that slaves and masters owed
each other. Masters, preached Jones, owed their protection, benevolence, and
fatherly care to their slaves, while slaves owed their masters but one thing:
obedience.

Plantations in Liberty County tended to be large, but because of the low-country
climate, many slaveholders lived on their plantations only a few months out
of the year. It was not uncommon for slaves to be alone on the plantation during
much of the unbearably hot summer, with only a slave overseer to manage the
work. The rice and cotton that grew on Liberty County plantations were quite
profitable because the land was so rich, and over the period that Clarke studies,
most of the planters in Liberty County were looking for more slaves, not trying
to sell them.

Under these conditions, a uniquely stable slave culture emerged on the low-country
plantations, a culture that Clarke reconstructs from the diaries of the slaves’ masters.
We meet, through the eyes and words of Jones and his relations, generations
of black families: fathers passing on roles such as carpenter or driver (foreman)
to their sons, mothers passing on their place in the plantation kitchen to
their daughters. One of Clarke’s accomplishments is to illuminate the
variation within the slave community: variation of personality, of aspiration,
of power, and of powerlessness. In other words, he reveals the slave community
as a human community, and one no less complex than the white community it served.

A Moral Struggle

As a young seminarian at Princeton, Charles Jones struggled with the morality
of slavery in a place far from his southern home. Through his diaries and his
letters to his future wife, Clarke reconstructs the young Southerner’s
conflicting feelings, his love of home and family inextricably tangled with
an institution that he increasingly believed to be wrong. His love of home
and family eventually won out, and Jones returned to Liberty County, married,
and began his campaign to bring religion to the slaves.

Early on, Jones believed that his work was in preparation for a time when
the slaves would be freed, but one of the dramatic ironies of Clarke’s
story is that, as the unforeseen historical emancipation of the slaves approached,
Jones became increasingly pro-slavery and increasingly skeptical of slaves’ ability
to handle freedom. Jones died in 1863 without seeing his slaves achieve the
freedom he had once imagined for them.

The efforts of Christian slaveholders such as Charles Jones to Christianize
the peculiar institution inevitably ran up against the hard economic realities
of a society in which slaves were viewed as property. As long as times were
good in Liberty County, it was easy to preach that slave families should be
kept together, that slaves should be well-fed and well-housed, and that white
masters and black slaves were equally members of God’s family, owing
love to one another. It was harder to carry out this vision when the cotton
didn’t sell and masters needed money, money that was invested in slaves
and that could only be realized by selling them.

Clarke shows that, because slavery was embedded in an economic system that
saw slaves primarily as a form of property, and because even the most sincere
Christian owners existed within this system, their efforts to act rightly towards
their slaves, to treat them as human beings rather than property, always ran
counter to the fundamental assumptions of a slave society. The spiritual bond
between brothers and sisters in Christ ran across the line between master and
slave. And that bond did not always hold.

Known & Unknown

Despite this fundamental and tragic contradiction, Clarke also illuminates
a world in which some of the closest relationships that white men and women
had were with their black slaves. Indeed, we would not have Clarke’s
description of the lives of black families and individuals if their white masters
had not written at length about them in private diaries. Slaves and masters
could also be united in their faith, and Charles Jones was present at the deathbed
of many of his slaves, urging them on to a glory where he hoped one day to
join them. Elsewhere, Clarke describes Jones taking part in a slave funeral
at night under a full moon, the only white man among the host of mourners.

Yet, Jones could still lament at one point that whites “live and die
in the midst of Negroes and know comparatively little of their real character.” His
lament points to the different levels on which a slave’s life was lived:
a public one in view of white masters, and a private one among other slaves.
It also points to the ineradicable barriers that slavery erected between two
peoples. Clarke illustrates this point beautifully when he contrasts the wide,
oak-lined roads that whites used to travel between plantations with the secret,
narrow, winding paths through the forest that slaves used for the same (for
them, forbidden) purposes.

Southern writer Eudora Welty once wrote that knowing one place well helps
us to know all other places better. This principle, that the particular always
reflects the universal, is certainly true of the small world of Liberty County
found in Dwelling Place. The richness of human detail allowed by
Clarke’s tight focus yields a bumper crop of insights into the inner
workings of a slave society. Another reviewer noted that the book resembles
a Russian novel, so complex is the web of relationships it portrays. The comparison
is well made, and one could only add that Dwelling Place also rivals
its Russian cousins in the depth of its insight into the human heart.

Robert Elder is currently writing a dissertation at Emory University on honor culture and Evangelical Christianity in the nineteenth-century American South. He writes the weblog, Clio and Calvin. He lives in Decatur, Georgia, with his wife Catherine, and is a member of Christ Church Presbyterian.

“Slavery in Black & White” first appeared in the April 2009 issue of Touchstone. If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue.

Letters Welcome: One of the reasons Touchstone exists is to encourage conversation among Christians, so we welcome letters responding to articles or raising matters of interest to our readers. However, because the space is limited, please keep your letters under 400 words. All letters may be edited for space and clarity when necessary. letters@touchstonemag.com